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Creationism

Ken Ham, the head of the Creationist group Answers In Genesis and founder of the Creation Museum, joined conservative radio host Janet Mefferd last week to discuss a new book about evangelicals who have embraced the theory of evolution. These Christians, Ham said, are following a “pagan religion” and are therefore inviting the judgment of God.

Ham said he wasn’t questioning the salvation of people like pastor Tim Keller who are open to a coexistence between the science of evolution and the Christian faith, but that it’s an “authority issue.”

“It really is an authority issue,” he said. “And once you start questioning the first part of the Bible, and I’ll guarantee that people like Tim Keller and others, when it comes down to it, the bottom line is they believe in millions of years.”

“I’m going to say it out very bluntly,” he said. “Look, millions of years in evolution is the pagan religion of this age to explain, to attempt to explain life without God. And when you compromise God’s word with millions of years and evolutionary ideas, you’re no different to the Israelites, who took the pagan religion of the age—or the Canaanites, or whatever—incorporated into their thinking. And look what happened. It destroyed them, and God judged them before it. We are no different, there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Ken Ham, the founder and president of the Young Earth Creationist group Answers In Genesis, slammed churches that are participating in a series of discussions about faith and evolution this weekend, claiming that it is in fact the belief in evolution that is turning America into a theocracy.

Ham joined VCY America’s Jim Schneider on his “Crosstalk” program on Wednesday to discuss today’s International Darwin Day and the corresponding Evolution Weekend, in which houses of worship participate in discussions about the relationship between faith and science.

Ham reserved most of his criticism for the churches participating in Evolution Weekend and groups such as BioLogos, a Christian organization that “invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith.”

He claimed that people who promote the teaching of evolution in churches, schools and universities are turning the government into a pro-evolution theocracy.

“There is no such thing as separation of church and state,” he said. “The First Amendment doesn’t even have that first terminology in it, you know. The Establishment Clause is about the state not establishing a church, but the state has established a church, it’s the Church of Evolution with Darwin as the high priest, if you like, and a lot of these teachers and professors as priests in this religion of evolution that they’re imposing through the schools.”

This widespread teaching of the theory of evolution, Ham said, has caused God to raise up Creationist groups like his.

Ham, whose group is behind the Creation Museum and an upcoming Noah’s ark theme park in Kentucky, explained that evolution has nothing to do with science since it is a religious belief … unlike Creationism, which is based on science.

“What we’ve got to understand is molecules-to-man evolution, that’s not observational science, that’s a belief, that’s a story that people made up to try to explain how life arose,” he said, without a hint of irony. “Christians have an account of origins in the Bible that God has given us.”

He said that the study of genetics, geology and biology “confirms the Bible’s account of creation and the flood and the Tower of Babel, it does not confirm molecules-to-man evolution. Molecules-to-man evolution is a fairy tale.”

Ham said that evolution shouldn’t even be addressed as a theory since “there’s no evidence for evolution, so it’s not even a theory, it’s actually a belief, it’s someone’s belief, it’s a blind faith belief and there is no evidence for evolution.”

He reasoned that evolution can’t be possible because he can’t see it occurring before his eyes.

“You don’t observe evolution,” he said. “When you look in the glass cases in museums, you don’t see evolution, you see fossils, you see creatures that live on the earth. Evolution is pasted on the glass case, not in the glass case. It’s man’s interpretation, man’s belief, man’s religion.”

Ken Ham, whose organization Answers In Genesis runs the Creation Museum and is currently building a replica of Noah’s ark, joined the Point of View radio program last week to discuss his worries that younger generations of Christians no longer believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Ham says he urges pastors to drop the phrase “Bible story” and instead “emphasize that it’s a book of history because Christianity is based in real history, it’s a history you can trust.”

He warned that losing a literal interpretation of the Bible could threaten not just Creationism but also the concept of marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, and even the wearing of clothing.

“The doctrine of marriage is based there upon the literal history of Genesis,” he said. “But if that history is not true, if there was no literal Adam and Eve, then what is marriage, why is it to be a man and a woman? It’s only a man and a woman because God invented marriage, and he invented marriage when he made the first marriage, Adam and Eve.”

He added that “the origin of clothing is right there in Genesis,” so “if you abandon Genesis’ literal history of marriage and say marriage can be two men or two women or whatever you want, well why not abandon clothing?”

On Monday, Ham took his case to the right-wing program "In the Market with Janet Parshall," where the host claimed that Ham is being "treated as a second class citizen" and is the victim of "viewpoint discrimination."

Ham said that the rights of all people of faith are at stake in his case. "If we don't do something about this it's like the old idea of the frog in the water that you can boil it up and boil it to death and it doesn't you're doing it because it keeps accommodating to the temperature around it," he told Parshall. "If Christians just keep accommodating and allowing this to happen more and more, we will lose that free exercise of religion."

"It's more and more of that trying to eliminate the Christian freedom that we have in this nation," he said.

Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis was a guest on American Family Radio today, where he discussed with Tim Wildmon his new project building a Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky. Ham insisted that the theme park, a complement to Ham's Creation Museum, has come under attack from “intolerant” liberals who want to deny it taxpayer funding.

Last month, Kentucky’s tourism board announced that the Noah’s Ark park wouldn’t be eligible for an $18 million tourism tax break because Answers In Genesis intends to use the site to proseletize and refuses to promise not to discriminate based on religion in its hiring. The board noted that “[s]tate tourism tax incentives cannot be used to fund religious indoctrination or otherwise be used to advance religion," but Ham cried persecution, complaining that Kentucky had violated his “fundamental rights” by witholding the tax break.

In the American Family Radio interview, Ham continued to portray himself as the victim of “intolerant” liberals (like Bill Nye) while also inadvertently bolstering the tourism board’s case by announcing that the Noah’s Ark park will be “one of the greatest evangelist outreaches of our day, of our period in history.”

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah reminds us today that October 23 is the day that 17th-century scholar James Ussher deduced was the day on which God created the Earth in the year 4004 BC, thus making today the Earth’s 6,028th birthday.

Farah marks the occasion by taking on some of the scientific quibbles with Young Earth Creationism, including the science showing that the earth is billions of years old and that dinosaurs roamed the earth millions of years ago.

While science “can never prove the age of the Earth,” Farah argues, ”God can, however, prove the age of the Earth because He was there. And someday, when He returns to judge His creation, He might just do that.”

He then argues that ancient depictions of mythical beasts are proof that humans coexisted with dinosaurs. “Is it crazier for me to believe the world is around 6,000 years old than it is to accept as scientific fact that it is actually millions or billions of years old?” he asks.

One thing we know for sure: Science can never prove the age of the Earth. Because science requires a methodology of observation and empirical testing that could never be done on an event that occurred thousands of years ago, millions of years ago or billions of years ago. God can, however, prove the age of the Earth because He was there. And someday, when He returns to judge His creation, He might just do that.

Until then, we have the detailed historical record He left us with in written form – the Bible.

I know what some of you are thinking: “Farah, what about the dinosaurs that were tens of millions of years old? How do you explain that?” Quite simply, I don’t believe it. Throughout man’s history, in every culture, we have stories, pictures and sculptures depicting dragons and leviathans and sea serpents. Are we to believe these were all concocted in man’s imagination? Even the Bible references such observations. If behemoths like the one described in chapter 40 of the Book of Job somehow threatened the Bible account of history, I don’t think it would be there.

But here’s the bottom line: Is it crazier for me to believe the world is around 6,000 years old than it is to accept as scientific fact that it is actually millions or billions of years old?

On his radio program yesterday, the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer cited a recent poll finding support in the U.S. for Israeli military action in Gaza, despite what Fischer claims is rampant anti-Israel “propaganda” in the media, to make a point about steady support for Creationism among the American public.

“The American public has been propagandized for over one hundred years with evolution and still forty percent of the American people believe that man was created substantially as he is today by God about 6,000 years ago,” Fischer said. “You just cannot kill the truth, there is no roundup that you can take to the truth that will kill it, it is relentless, it is going to keep breaking the surface.”

Bob Frey, a Michele Bachmann ally and Republican candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives, wants public schools to teach students that humans and dinosaurs lived together.

Frey, who also has his ownbizarretheory about HIV/AIDS, alleged in a 2004 appearance before the Minnesota State Senate Education Committee that the fossil record proves that “dinosaurs have always lived with man,” and such “real science” should be taught in public schools.

No matter where you go when visiting America’s national parks, city zoos, and other attractions, the religion of evolution and millions of years permeates the culture. To help combat these lies and proclaim the authority of God’s Word, every year Answers in Genesis partners with Canyon Ministries to hold creation raft trips through the Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. Canyon Ministries has been presenting the Grand Canyon from a biblical perspective since 1997. The trips were done while rafting through the canyon, showing guests firsthand the evidence of Creation and Noah’s Flood. But now Canyon Ministries has added something new.

Last year, Canyon Ministries began providing land-based rim tours of the Grand Canyon along its South Rim, operating under the name A Different View Tours. Now, rather than go to the rim and hear the anti-God, evolutionary explanation of the Canyon’s formation, I encourage you to consider a tour with Canyon Ministries. It will provide you with a Bible-based presentation of the geology of the Canyon and how it confirms the Bible’s account of a global Flood and belief in a young earth. The teaching is very similar to what you would receive on a raft tour, and it is done in the comfort of a vehicle.

Canyon Ministries, which holds that the “account of origins presented in Genesis occurred in the span of six consecutive twenty-four hour days six to ten thousand years ago,” attempted to have its Creationist material used by the National Parks Service but was rejected [PDF].

But the Peroutkas’ influence extends far beyond fringe anti-gay, neo-Confederate activism and providing a real-life dinosaur to illustrate made-up science. Through a set of debt-collection businesses, the Peroutkas finance a host of anti-choice groups and promote a troubling Christian-Nation ideology in Maryland and throughout the country. Michael Peroutka, a 2004 Constitution Party candidate for president, is also largely self-financing his campaign for local office in Anne Arundel County.

It’s through the law firm and its debt-buying arm, Pasadena Recievables, that the Peroutka brothers finance the Elizabeth Streb Peroutka Foundation, which is named after their mother.

From its founding in 2003 through 2012, the last year for which tax records are available, the family’s foundation has been almost entirely financed by grants from the Peroutkas' pair of debt-collection businesses, along with investment income and a few personal donations from Michael and Stephen. Together, the family and its businesses have put $5.2 million into the foundation over nine years.

From the moment the bones were found, their discoverers vowed to keep them out of the hands of scientists, who estimate that the Allosaurus lived roughly 150 million years ago. “I am sure the evolutionists would love to get their hands on these bones," Phillips said at the time. “Who can blame them. It is like a gold mine for paleontologists.”

Peroutka cited those fears at the Creation Museum unveiling last month, when he told of how he came to purchase Ebenezer. He was determined to keep the dinosaur out of the hands of “anyone with a ‘millions of years’ mindset,” he said, and to keep it under the guardianship of those who believe the skeleton is just 4,300 years old:

While snatching the dinosaur from the evolutionists has been the Peroutka family foundation’s priciest project, Michael explained in his remarks at the museum that the foundation was “primarily intended to offer financial aid to groups who were dedicated to ending the holocaust of abortion.”

In addition, the Peroutka Foundation has contributed a quarter of a million dollars to the Foundation for Moral Law, the group that Moore ran before returning to the Alabama Supreme Court, and which is now run by Moore’s wife. Under Moore’s leadership, the Foundation for Moral Law hosted a neo-Confederate “secession day” event, and the group employs John Eidsmoe, a Michelle Bachmann mentor who has white supremacist ties. One of Moore's activities at the group was representing protesters who had disrupted a Hindu opening prayer in the U.S. Senate. “It's a shame that not one U.S. Senator stood up to defend a tradition that goes back to the very first Continental Congress of acknowledging the one true God of the Holy Scriptures," he lamented.

In 2011, the Institute on the Constitution presented Moore with an award for “choosing to obey God, and acknowledging Him both in word and in deed, regardless of the consequences” and resisting “a government which thought it was God.”

While anti-choice groups and Moore have been the biggest recipients of the Peroutka Foundation’s generosity — at least until Ebenezer moved into the Creation Museum — the foundation has also offered smaller grants to a smattering of extremist ministries and Confederate history enthusiasts.

Since 2006, the foundation has given an annual $1,000 grant to restoring a Confederate cemetery in Maryland, a project organized by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that has cozied up to the racist extremists in its ranks. In 2004, it donated $2,250 to a Confederate reenactment troop for "education of the public as to the causes of the War between the States."

The Peroutkas are also frequent donors to state and local campaigns. According to Center for Responsive Politics data, Michael, Stephen and Stephen’s wife Deborah contributed $35,900 to their congressman, Rep. Andy Harris, between 2007 and 2011.

Not the least of the beneficiaries is Michael Peroutka himself, who has lent $30,000 to his own campaign for Anne Arundel County Council, about half of the $62,000 he has raised so far. His political ambitions may continue to run higher — it was rumored that he considered running for state attorney general this year before setting his sights on the county council.

Peroutka’s web of influence shows that he is more than, as one libertarian scholar put it, a "wackypants anti-gay crusader.” Peroutka's activism and philanthropy illuminate the connections between the Creationist movement, the Christian-Nation philosophy of people like Judge Moore, anti-choice agitators, fringe anti-gay extremists like Daubenmire and Klingenschmitt, and the network of Confederate nostalgists that can never quite hide its racist roots. All are striving for a biblical and constitutional purism that exists only in the minds of those who adhere to it, and a return to an imagined past where dinosaurs stowed away on Noah’s ark, the Constitution mandated an exclusively Christian nation, and the Civil War didn't turn out quite right.

Rick Wiles, the End Times radio host who thinks the Sandy Hook and Columbine shootings were carried out by CIA “mind-control assassins” and that Adolf Hitler’s "race of super gay male soldiers” is taking over America, is angry at Pat Robertson for saying “crazy things” and becoming an “embarrassment” to the conservative movement.

On his TruNews program on Friday, Wiles lamented that he used to look up to Robertson, but “in recent years, Dr. Robertson has been saying some really crazy things” about Creationism and is “becoming an embarrassment to those of us who are upholding the ancient faith handed down in the Book of Genesis.”

Wiles was joined by the Creation Museum’s Terry Mortenson, who explained that modern geology and the big bang theory were developed by “godless men or professing Christians who didn’t pay attention to what the Bible said.”

He added that scientists who fail to take the Bible literally are"really, really irresponsible" and like police detectives who ignore eyewitness testimony, because “God’s eyewitness testimony in the scripture is the key evidence for unravelling the rocks of the earth.”

Wiles spent the first half of his program presenting the totally reasonable theories that the Bilderberg Group is controlling U.S. presidential elections and that the Federal Reserve is going to start cutting off the bank accounts of same-sex marriage opponents.

Creation Museum founder Ken Ham found it “ironic” that Bill Nye, who joined Ham in a debate on Creationism earlier this year, attended the White House Science Fair.

Ham wrote on his blog yesterday that evolution didn’t play a role in any of the projects featured in the fair, which he believes proves that teaching Creationism in public schools would not “undermine technology.”

“The students could all be biblical creationists and that wouldn’t change even one aspect of their experiments and ideas,” he said.

On May 27, President Obama hosted the “White House Science Fair.” The White House describes this fair as featuring “extraordinary science projects and experiments from some of America’s most innovative students.”

President Obama introduced various government officials, and then the fifth person he introduced was Bill Nye “the Science Guy” of TV fame. Nye received the loudest applause, and President Obama then commented on that response. I actually thought it was ironic that Bill Nye was present. Let me explain.

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During that debate, Bill Nye made disparaging statements about the state of Kentucky, claiming that if students were not taught evolution in school, it would undermine technology. In fact he’s made many similar statements before and after the debate.

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I have a question about the fair and its experiments: Please tell me what the role of a belief in evolution played in any of these experiments and innovative ideas? The answer is none! Evolution is not mentioned. The students could all be biblical creationists and that wouldn’t change even one aspect of their experiments and ideas. Isn’t it ironic, that Bill Nye, who has stated over and over again that students will not be innovative if they believe in creation, was present for these innovative students to be honored—and evolution had zero to do with their accomplishments!

He went on to invite students to attend a camp organized by the Creation Museum:

It’s not beliefs in evolution that are foundational to technology—it’s the Christian worldview founded in the Creator who created the laws of logic, the laws of nature, and the uniformity of nature!

To help your students love science and be innovative—don’t let them be taught by Bill Nye. Send them instead to the Creation Museum, and sign them up for the STEM camp this summer that is run by biblical creationists.

Ham, who recently held a debate with Bill Nye, said in a blog post today that he is willing to debate Robertson either on the “700 Club” or at Regent University, the school founded by Robertson.

I wonder if Pat Robertson would be prepared to discuss these issues with me or one of our AiG scientists on the 700 Club? Or maybe in some sort of debate format at Regent University? We are certainly willing to do that—maybe all of you reading this could challenge CBN/Regent University to allow such a discussion, debate, or forum to occur publicly. I wonder if Pat Robertson, who is allowed to state these things so publicly through CBN will agree to have his statements publicly challenged and tested!

Many Christians believe that the world is very old based on fossil records that are presumably dated at millions of years. Indeed the dispute between an old earth and a young earth is hotly debated within the Christian community. Unfortunately, those who subscribe to an old earth theory do not realize the enormity of their compromise.

The compromise is that as soon as one allows for an earth millions of years old, then one has accepted death, bloodshed, disease and suffering before Adam’s sin. In other words, the Garden of Eden would have been seated upon a mountain of dead animal bones. This doesn’t sound much like paradise.

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Now if the world were millions of years old as suggested by evolutionists, blood was shed and death occurred before Adam's original sin. This would destroy the foundation of the atonement brought by the death of Christ on the cross. According to 1 Corinthians 15:54, sin and death have been swallowed up in victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus the enormity of compromise is revealed. To believe in evolution undermines the entire gospel message of Jesus Christ. All Christians believe that Jesus Christ suffered physical death and shed His blood because death was the penalty for sin. Therefore, teaching millions of years of death, disease and suffering before Adam sinned, is a direct attack on the foundation and message of the Cross.

Responding to Robertson’s recent remarks that “you have to be deaf, dumb and blind to think that this Earth that we live in only has 6,000 years of existence,” Ham fired back on his Facebook page yesterday.

Ham, whose group Answers in Genesis runs the Creation Museum, said that Robertson’s comments were “beyond ignorant” and incorporated “pagan ideas,” arguing that his attack on “the authority of the Word” amounts to an attack on Jesus Christ.

If you watch the CBN "700 Club" program from 37:50 to 40:56 on Tuesday (see link below), you will hear Pat Robertson:

1. ... claim that: “The truth is, you have to be deaf, dumb and blind to think that this earth that we live in only has six thousand years of existence."

So, Robertson has called all of you who believe God’s Word as written in Genesis as “deaf, dumb and blind.”

2. ... express his utter ignorance of science as he equates radio carbon dating with millions of years! He just has no idea! Carbon dating has nothing to do with millions of years—he’s using the wrong dating method to even discuss millions of years. Yes, it's his ignorance that abounds.

3. ... give an explanation of the first three days of creation that is, well, beyond ignorant! Frankly it is ridiculous.

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Sadly, it’s Pat Robertson who makes Christianity look silly, which is why the atheists love him today. What a travesty! This man uses his position on a major Christian TV program to help the atheists mock God’s Word!

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Pat Robertson illustrates one of the biggest problems we have today in the church—people like Robertson compromise the Word of God with the pagan ideas of fallible men! That’s why a big part of the AiG ministry is to call the church and culture back to the authority of the Word. Pat Robertson is not upholding the Word of God with his ridiculous statements -- he is undermining the authority of the Word. And any attack on the WORD is an attack on the person of Jesus Christ, who IS THE WORD!

Religious Right activists just can’t seem to get enough of movies about the purported persecution of Christians in America, churning out movies such as “God’s Not Dead,” “Uncommon” and “Persecuted.”

Answers In Genesis, the Young Earth Creationist group behind the Creation Museum, released a trailer yesterday for its very own persecution tale, “A Matter of Faith.”

The movie appears to center around a father who is upset that his daughter’s college biology professor isn’t giving equal time to “biblical Creation as a plausible alternative” to evolution. Like in “God’s Not Dead” — in which a student debates an atheist professor played by Kevin Sorbo — the worried father ends up debating the biology professor in a fight for his daughter’s soul.

AIG has routinely warned members that public schools and universities are leading young people away from Christianity by teaching them the science of evolution. As AIG head Ken Ham argues in his book “Already Gone,” schools and churches which don’t teach biblical accounts like Genesis as literal texts have led young people astray.

In a radio interview on Friday, Creation Museum founder Ken Ham attacked evolution as a “religion” that has “brainwashed” its adherents into thinking that they are observing a scientific theory.

Ham, a Young Earth Creationist, criticized Christians who believe in evolution by touching on the Creationist talking point that the Bible is the only eyewitness account of the history of the world.

“A lot of these Christian leaders, when they say the word ‘day’ [in Genesis] can’t mean an ordinary day because of science, it’s not observational science they’re referring to, it’s man’s historical science. In other words, man’s beliefs about evolution and millions of years,” Ham told VCY America’s Crosstalk.

“They’re taking man’s religion of millions of years and saying, ‘That’s why you can’t believe what the Bible says.’ If the word ‘day’ in Genesis 1 means an ordinary day and you say it can’t because of what man is saying, then you’ve just said God’s word is fallible and it’s man’s word that is infallible. No, it’s the other way around.”

Religious Right activist Frank Turek claimed yesterday that Thomas Jefferson would lead a second American Revolution against the teaching of evolution.

In an interview on Washington Watch, Turek told the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins that by proscribing Creationism, public schools have effectively declared “that the Declaration of Independence is unconstitutional.”

“If [Jefferson] were to come back to America today and find that his tax dollars were going to pay public school teachers to teach his school children that his Declaration of Independence was unconstitutional, I think he’d start the Second American Revolution,” Turek insisted.

Perkins agreed: “I think you’re right.”

Turek: If these bureaucrats are going to say that we can’t mention Creation anywhere in school, I ask them this question: Are you telling me that the Declaration of Independence is unconstitutional? Because the Declaration of Independence talks about our Creator, it says we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, it says that we were created. Please don’t tell me the Declaration of Independence is unconstitutional. I think I know what Thomas Jefferson would do, the man who said that taxation without representation is tyranny, if he were to come back to America today and find that his tax dollars were going to pay public school teachers to teach his school children that his Declaration of Independence was unconstitutional, I think he’d start the Second American Revolution.

The Creationist group Answers In Genesis, which was already incensed about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s revival of Cosmos, is now complaining that the show lacks scientific balance because it fails to provide airtime for evolution deniers.

Danny Faulkner of Answers In Genesis and the Creation Museum appeared on The Janet Mefferd Showyesterday to criticize Cosmos for not providing airtime for Creationism adherents. When Mefferd asked if Cosmos will “ever give a Creationist any time,” Faulkner responded by lamenting that “Creationists aren’t even on the radar screen for them, they wouldn’t even consider us plausible at all.”

Mefferd agreed that the show isn’t being very fair and balanced: “Boy, but when you have so many scientists who simply do not accept Darwinian evolution it seems to me that that might be something to throw in there, you know, the old, ‘some scientists say this, others disagree and think this,’ but that’s not even allowed.”

“Consideration of special Creation is definitely not open for discussion it would seem,” Faulkner added.

Arguing that evolution, the foundation of modern biology, and one of many theological beliefs on human creation are simply “two sides” that merit competing time on a science program is much like the equallyabsurdargument Creationists use when trying to undermine the teaching of evolution in public schools.

Dr. John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research explains that sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder that affords a selective advantage against malarial infection, demonstrates that evolution, unlike Creationism, is fundamentally flawed.

“Evolution says that beneficial mutations have occurred trillions of times, but their best example is the fatal disease,” John Morris said in a radio bulletin today. “The point is, they’re grasping at straws; the Creation story, like we’re told back in Genesis, it’s much more credible.”

A gene known as HbS was the center of a medical and evolutionary detective story that began in the middle 1940s in Africa. Doctors noticed that patients who had sickle cell anemia, a serious hereditary blood disease, were more likely to survive malaria, a disease which kills some 1.2 million people every year. What was puzzling was why sickle cell anemia was so prevalent in some African populations.

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Researchers found that the sickle cell gene is especially prevalent in areas of Africa hard-hit by malaria. In some regions, as much as 40 percent of the population carries at least one HbS gene.

It turns out that, in these areas, HbS carriers have been naturally selected, because the trait confers some resistance to malaria. Their red blood cells, containing some abnormal hemoglobin, tend to sickle when they are infected by the malaria parasite. Those infected cells flow through the spleen, which culls them out because of their sickle shape -- and the parasite is eliminated along with them.

Scientists believe the sickle cell gene appeared and disappeared in the population several times, but became permanently established after a particularly vicious form of malaria jumped from animals to humans in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

In areas where the sickle cell gene is common, the immunity conferred has become a selective advantage. Unfortunately, it is also a disadvantage because the chances of being born with sickle cell anemia are relatively high.

For parents who each carry the sickle cell trait, the chance that their child will also have the trait -- and be immune to malaria -- is 50 percent. There is a 25 percent chance that the child will have neither sickle cell anemia nor the trait which enables immunity to malaria. Finally, the chances that their child will have two copies of the gene, and therefore sickle cell anemia, is also 25 percent. This situation is a stark example of genetic compromise, or an evolutionary "trade-off."

During the controversy over Hobby Lobby’s refusal to provide its employees with contraception insurance coverage and the outrage over Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson’s being denied his supposed constitutional right to appear on television, we witnessed conservative activists stretch the limits of the meaning of religious freedom.

As Justice Scalia put it in Employment Division v. Smith, such an exaggerated view of religious freedom serves “to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

The Religious Right has increasingly brought this religious freedom argument into debates over gay rights and the teaching of evolution.

In Missouri, Republican lawmakers contend that public school students should get an exemption from any class on evolution — the bedrock of modern biology — if they think learning about science amounts to an “infringement on people’s beliefs”:

Rep. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican, said forcing students to study the natural selection theories developed by Charles Darwin a century and a half ago can violate their religious faith.

“It’s an absolute infringement on people’s beliefs,” Brattin said.

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“Even though what’s being taught is just as much faith and, you know, just as much pulled out of the air as, say, any religion,” he said.

“The bill is one of several anti-evolution proposals that have already appeared in statehouses across the country,” TPM notes. “The proposals would allow for a range of approaches to evolution, from presenting a ‘debate’ over evolution versus creationism to requiring that local school boards allow intelligent design to be included in biology courses.”

And GOP lawmakers in at least three states are now citing religious freedom to claim that anti-gay discrimination that violates civil rights laws should not face any legal consequences.

Now there is a push in states including Tennessee, Idaho and Kansas to allow for legally protected discrimination. Mark Joseph Stern writes of the Kansas bill:

When passed, the new law will allow any individual, group, or private business to refuse to serve gay couples if “it would be contrary to their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Private employers can continue to fire gay employees on account of their sexuality. Stores may deny gay couples goods and services because they are gay. Hotels can eject gay couples or deny them entry in the first place. Businesses that provide public accommodations—movie theaters, restaurants—can turn away gay couples at the door. And if a gay couple sues for discrimination, they won’t just lose; they’ll be forced to pay their opponent’s attorney’s fees. As I’ve noted before, anti-gay businesses might as well put out signs alerting gay people that their business isn’t welcome.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to barring all anti-discrimination lawsuits against private employers, the new law permits government employees to deny service to gays in the name of “religious liberty.” This is nothing new, but the sweep of Kansas’ statute is breathtaking. Any government employee is given explicit permission to discriminate against gay couples—not just county clerks and DMV employees, but literally anyone who works for the state of Kansas. If a gay couple calls the police, an officer may refuse to help them if interacting with a gay couple violates his religious principles. State hospitals can turn away gay couples at the door and deny them treatment with impunity. Gay couples can be banned from public parks, public pools, anything that operates under the aegis of the Kansas state government.

It gets worse. The law’s advocates claim that it applies only to gay couples—but there’s no clear limiting principle in the text of the bill that would keep it from applying to gay individuals as well. A catch-all clause allows businesses and bureaucrats to discriminate against gay people so long as this discrimination is somehow “related to, orrelated to the celebration of, any marriage, domestic partnership, civil union or similar arrangement.” (Emphases mine.) This subtle loophole is really just a blank check to discriminate: As long as an individual believes that his service is somehow linked to a gay union of any form, he can legally refuse his services. And since anyone who denies gays service is completely shielded from any charges, no one will ever have to prove that their particular form of discrimination fell within the four corners of the law.